Panda Updates- Tuesday, November 1

The last two weekends of October, we celebrated Boo at the Zoo, our Halloween festival, here at Zoo Atlanta. If you visited the Zoo during this time, you may have seen several exciting things around, including characters to greet and take photos with, fun themed decorations, and (of course) candy booths. Something else you may have seen was Halloween enrichment activities for Zoo animals. This may have included a few animals enjoying pumpkins … lots and lots of pumpkins. For many animals, pumpkin may be a tasty treat that they get to enjoy around this time of year. For others, pumpkins may just be an interesting new object to investigate and interact with. Last week, we cut up a pumpkin and offered each of the pandas pieces of it to investigate. Unfortunately, sometimes, enrichment isn’t as exciting as we hope it will be. Yang Yang and Lun Lun both just deemed that the pumpkin pieces we placed around were in their way and pushed them over to get to their bamboo. Ya Lun was interested in it and pawed at it a bit. Xi Lun smelled it and decided pumpkin was not something that she liked, immediately seeming to turn her nose up at it.

It’s still fun for us to see how each individual reacts differently to something new!

Megan H.
Keeper II, Mammals